Hospitals a classic blunder: A guest column by Roberta Brandes Gratz

Jane Jacobs, the author and advocate for urban life, famously said: "Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate." She could have been talking about New Orleans after the storms.

Jacobs was probably the 20th century's most astute observer of how cities work, how they organically evolve, change, weaken and renew themselves through the modest, collective efforts of local citizens, businesses and social institutions. This process only works where allowed to do so, she observed, not interrupted by big imposed plans that obstruct rather than enhance the process.

After World War II, the strategy for rebuilding neglected American cities was the antithesis of Jacobs' philosophy -- top down, with big financing, imposed order, and replacement rather than regeneration. That view was epitomized by Robert Moses, New York's building and highway czar for 40 years. Through his vast urban renewal and highway projects, Moses brought New York to its lowest point in the 1970s and set a pattern across the country from which many crippled, heavily demolished and over-suburbanized cities are struggling to recover even today.

In the 1960s, New Orleans fought off one of the two Moses expressway plans for this city. The French Quarter was spared; Treme was not. Divisive elevated roads like Interstate 10 are coming down now in many cities. The urban fabric is then organically renewing itself.

Moses was all about wiping away the genuine city, separating uses, building for cars, diminishing mass transit and ignoring pedestrians. Jacobs led and inspired resistance to him. She advocated for positive change, new construction in scale with the old and, above all, for true participation of its people. Her vision has been central to New York's celebrated recovery.

The Moses-Jacobs lens is useful to understand the distinctions between genuine revitalization and what is only label-deep, whether in New York or here in New Orleans. While Jacobs' faith in the resilient, resident-driven process has been affirmed all over town, the Moses philosophy seems to be prevailing in damaging ways.

Within weeks after the storms, I came to New Orleans to observe and write about this city. I have been writing about urban life for 40 years. Through this lens, I began to watch. I knew its recovery would be the most compelling story in America.

The city and its people -- heroic, resilient, creative -- have not disappointed me. I watched the power of this place burst forth in their determination to save what was unique. Along the way, I bought a house in the Bywater, commuted from New York and observed in awe the many small, citizen-initiated efforts leading to big change.

Conflicts in New York are intense. I found relief here observing the determination among deeply committed residents in the face of such an excruciating experience. So it has been with curiosity and horror that I have watched the same Moses/Jacobs dichotomy unfold here.

I sat in last week at the City Council hearing about the closing of the streets in just the VA portion of the 67-acre, 27-block hospital district. I saw how the worst of the Moses legacy has taken hold just as his damaging vision is being repudiated everywhere else in the country.

Everyone wants both hospitals. But with all the meetings on specific aspects, there has never been a thorough public discussion of alternatives, never a real examination of the true costs and benefits, whether the money is really available to build both and surely never a full discussion of the impact on the shape of the city. All real decisions have been made away from the public eye. This is classic Moses.

I saw displaced homeowners who did not have a chance to report the broken promises about their compensation and relocation while scores of contractors make money on their misery. I realized the public sees streets being closed as a narrow matter, instead of the shaper of the entire hospital district and reshaper of the city's historic core.

Built on a platform rising 22 feet in the air, with closed streets and minimal pedestrian access, the sprawling, car-dependant hospital campus will be thoroughly isolated from the city's already fragile downtown, where empty buildings and vacant space abound.

Room for two fully modernized hospitals exists without destroying a regenerating, authentic urban neighborhood and further crippling the core as businesses gravitate to the new district.

This is classic Moses and will be New Orleans' second man-made disaster, from which it will take decades to recover.
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Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of "The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs," will give the second annual Jane Jacobs lecture today at 6 p.m. at the Louisiana Humanities Center at Turners' Hall, 938 Lafayette St., New Orleans. The lecture title is "The Battle For New Orleans."